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Government released hundreds of immigrant felons

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials freed 193 undocumented immigrants who had been convicted of homicide, 426 of sexual assault, 303 of kidnapping and more than 16,000 with drunken-driving records.

Government released hundreds of immigrant felons

President Barack Obama greets law enforcement leaders from across the country after speaking in Washington. Obama discussed immigration reform while meeting with the law enforcement leaders.(Photo: Win McNamee, Getty Images)Buy Photo

With President Obama's Department of Homeland Security finalizing a review of its deportation practices to see how they can be conducted "more humanely," critics are using a report that found 36,007 convicted criminals were released by immigration officials last year to call for an end to the review.

In 2013, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials freed 193 people who had been convicted of homicide, 426 of sexual assault, 303 of kidnapping and more than 16,000 with drunken-driving records.

The author of the report, conducted by the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates for lower levels of immigration, said those releases show that the administration needs to be toughening its immigration enforcement efforts, not weakening them.

"In light of these numbers, it will be hard to justify further relaxation of enforcement or reductions in detention capacity, as the administration has sought," said Jessica Vaughan, the center's director of policy studies.

"Congress should resist further action on immigration reform until the public can be assured that enforcement is more robust and that ICE can better deal with its criminal alien caseload without setting them free in our communities."

ICE spokeswoman Barbara Gonzalez said the report misses the fact that many of the releases were carried out under orders from U.S. courts. For example, she said 75% of the people released who had murder convictions were "mandatory releases."

Other cases listed in the report included people who could not be returned to their home country. Those people, Gonzalez said, cannot be held indefinitely in their custody.

Even when they're released, Gonzalez said, the undocumented immigrants were placed under restrictions such as GPS monitoring, telephone monitoring and in-person checks.

"Others, typically those with less serious offenses, were released as a discretionary matter after career law enforcement officers made a judgement regarding the priority of holding the individual, given ICE's resources, and prioritizing the detention and removal of individuals who pose a risk to public safety or national security," she said in a statement.

Ben Johnson, executive director of the American Immigration Council, a group that supports efforts to grant legal status to the nation's undocumented immigrants, said many of the people listed in the ICE report were green card holders and all had served their court-ordered terms in prison.

He said the report only serves as more "anti-immigrant fear-mongering at its lowest.

"Immigrants are demonized as dangerous criminals, despite the fact that they are less likely to commit serious crimes or be behind bars than the native-born," Johnson said. "Individual cases of serious crimes committed by immigrants are held up as proof that all of 'them' are a threat to 'us.'"

The report comes at a critical time in Washington, where Republicans in the House of Representatives are resisting a push to pass a broad immigration bill because of their lack of faith in Obama to enforce whatever new enforcement measures they may pass.

"The truth is that most could be detained by immigration authorities if the administration had the will to do so," read a joint statement from Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, former chairman of the committee. "These criminals should be locked up, not roaming our streets."

On the other side, Obama is getting heat from immigration advocates who say he has been too hard on undocumented immigrants. His administration has now deported more than two million people. And while most of those were people caught along the border, that figure is being used by immigration advocates to push for fewer deportations of the nation's 12 million undocumented immigrants.